Kansas City Star editorial: Japan should own up to its sordid actions

Kansas City Star editorial
Posted on Sat, Mar. 17, 2007
‘Comfort women’ denials split hairs, damage credibility
Japan should own up to its sordid actions

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has denied that the military was involved in coercing thousands of women to serve as sex slaves during World War II. This is another sad example of Japanese denial over the country’s wartime savagery.

Abe seemed to suggest that since the Imperial Japanese Army wasn’t directly involved in forcibly rounding up the sex slaves — estimated at 200,000 — Imperial Japan’s guilt is somehow diminished, even though the women were confined to brothels patronized by the military.

But in 1993 Tokyo acknowledged that the Imperial Japanese Army did help set up the network of the euphemistically named “comfort stations” in nations invaded by Japan during the war.

Abe now wants to back away from that admission. The latest line: Yes, coercion was involved in rounding up the women, but it was done by private dealers rather than government authorities.

This is a virtually meaningless distinction when discussing countries that fell victim to the ferocious brutality of Japanese troops.

The controversy over wartime atrocities has flared anew in part because of a resolution introduced in the U.S. Congress, urging Japan to acknowledge responsibility for its abuse of the comfort women and to apologize for it.

The Yomiuri Shimbun, echoing Abe’s argument, noted that, “The (U.S.) resolution says the Japanese military commissioned the acquisition of comfort women. However, no documents have been found to support this assertion. Historians also accept that no such orchestrated action was undertaken by the Japanese military.”

Nonsense. This flies in the face of testimony by the surviving “comfort women” as well as the work of historians — some of them Japanese — who cite statements from military officials and documents from the United States and other countries.

Japan has profoundly damaged its standing in Asia and the world — and undermined its ability to provide leadership commensurate with its economic status — by decades of haggling over its past.

The aspiration of many Japanese is for their country to become a “normal nation.” It’s not likely to happen as long as Japan continues to deny its own past.